Do documents have to be delivered by the Court?
In general, every document that is filed with a court or that comes from a court must be delivered to all other parties involved in the case. If one party is represented by an attorney, his or her documents must go to that attorney. This delivery of documents is called service. A person who has received the documents is served the documents.

The person who is filing the document must use a Certificate of Service to prove who was served with the document, how, when and where. Service of a document may take place in one of several ways:

1. Mailing it to the last known address of the person to be served;

2. By faxing it to the person to be served;

3. By personally delivering a copy of the document to the person who is being served, leaving it at his or her office, leaving it with someone else (of age) who lives at the residence of the person to be served.

Every document filed with the court must include the Certificate of Service. The rules will not let a Clerk of Court accept any document for filing with the court that doesn’t include a proper Certificate of Service.

This content was created by the Ohio State Bar Foundation's 2006 Fellows Class - Keys to the Courtroom Project.